Fritinancy

On the "For" Front

I've been using MyCheckFree to pay one of my utility bills. Earlier this week I received an e-mail informing me that a second Bay Area utility company now offers online bill payment through MyCheckFree, so I added that company to my online account. No problem with that. But I did have a problem with a sentence on the screen that presented itself after I enrolled:

We're waiting for your first e-Bill. Check back here for it to arrive.

What does that second sentence signify? Its literal meaning seems to be:

Check back here [in order] for it to arrive.

Or (because of the imperative structure):

In order for the e-Bill to arrive, you must check back here.

Both of those interpretations aren't just odd, they're inaccurate. No amount of "checking back" will force an e-bill to arrive if it isn't ready. (I tried several times.)

The Free Dictionary lists more than a dozen meanings for "for." As a preposition, it can indicate purpose, destination, the recipient of an action, "on behalf of," equivalence, correlation, amount, being, "because of," appropriateness, "despite," concerning, and "in honor of." As a conjunction, it can mean "because" or "since."

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any of those meanings in "... for it to arrive."

You could say "Check back here for a pleasant surprise" or "Check back here for seven consecutive days--or else" or "Check back here, for Pete's sake!"  But the MyCheckFree sentence isn't constructed in any of those ways.

Now, you've probably deduced that the intention of the sentence is something like:

Check back here to see whether it has arrived.

Which takes up hardly any more space than the original and makes more sense.

But here's the thing: I don't need to "check back" at all! Whenever a new bill has been posted, MyCheckFree sends me an e-mail with an online-payment link. So why (a) confuse me and (b) encourage me to waste my time "checking back"? Why not say "We'll send you an e-mail when we have something to tell you"?

P.S. Don't even get me started on deconstructing "MyCheckFree." I think it means "my check-free bill payment," but it sure doesn't sound like it originated with native English speakers.

P.P.S. I have no complaints about the MyCheckFree service, however.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Hyphens

Perhaps you heard the news last week about 16,000 hyphens "vanishing" from the newly published 6th edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bill Walsh--blogger, Washington Post copy editor, and author of a couple of excellent books on punctuation and usage--explains why it's a non-issue, or even a nonissue:

Bill Hyphen Walsh must be aghast at this travesty, right? Well, no. Bill Hyphen Walsh issues blustery pronouncements about American English. These are British hyphens, hyphens as unnecessary and uninteresting as they are un-American, hyphens that link adjectives to the nouns they modify. The Brits get all worried that you might think a dressing gown is a gown that is dressing, and so they write dressing-gown to make it clear that it's a gown of the dressing variety. We'd never write dressing-gown, and not only because we have the superior term bathrobe.

Americans do use such hyphens, but only as a last resort, and often in terms most unsavory. There are giant-killers who are killers of giants as opposed to killers who are giants, and there are child-rapists who are rapists of children as opposed to rapists who are children. But we're sensible enough to know without the aid of a hyphen that a mountain climber isn't a climber that's a mountain.

Read the whole post, which features one of my all-time-favorite (yes! hyphenated in the all-American way!) headlines from The Onion.

May Wiw? Mais Wiw!

Mary Sullivan of Way to Grow emailed to tell me about the latest buzzword in media: WiwWiwWiw. It stands for "What I Want, When I Want, Where I Want," and it's pronounced "wee wee wee" (in French: "oui oui oui")--as Susan Willet Bird tells it, just like the punchline in "This Little Piggy Went to Market." Shelly Palmer, who blogs about "media 3.0," used the term to explain the pressures that led to the Today Show's decision to add a fourth hour of programming.

WiwWiwWiw is by no means to be confused with Nintendo's Wii.

Naming Notes: TechCrunch40

Last week the influential technology blog TechCrunch hosted its two-day annual conference, TechCrunch40, at which forty "of the hottest new startups from around the world" unveiled their products. I didn't attend (if you want an insider's view, Sylvia Paull offers a slightly jaundiced one), but I did take some time to consider the hot companies' names. Here are my short takes on five of the forty.

8020 Publishing, in San Francisco, "brings together the best of the web and print." Numbers are showing up in company names in some interesting variations (see, for example, my post on 23andMe), and this one strikes me as especially smart. In a company blog post notable for its thoughtful tone, founder Derek Powazek explains that "8020" comes from the "80/20 rule," also known as the Pareto Principle, which postulates that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the effort. "We chose to name our company after this magic ratio," Powazek writes, "because we wanted to embrace the way communities form online. In our experience, to maintain a healthy online community, you need to maintain another 80/20 split: 80% readers (the silent majority in any community, sometimes called lurkers), and 20% writers (the vocal minority, the people who power the conversation)." A sophisticated logo underscores the intelligence of the name.

Cake Financial, also in San Francisco, is "a free online service that makes it easy to follow the portfolios and the real-time trades of your family and friends as well as top-performing members within the Cake community." The juxtaposition of "Cake" and "Financial" is surprising, and that's the point: The founders are positioning the company as an alternative to conventional financial services. Yet the name isn't frivolous. "Cake" is a strong, simple word with multiple associations--from the delights of birthday cake to "have your cake and eat it too" to "icing on the cake." (OK, it's also in "Let them eat cake," which may not be as bad as it seems.) Cake Financial gently pushes the metaphor in its slice-of-cake logo--I like the way it challenges the "pie" chart cliché--and in a section of the website titled "Why Cake Is Good for You."

Spottt has a cute doggie mascot and, yes, three T's, although its logo makes the name look more like "SpotIt." The business, which hasn't yet launched officially, will provide free link exchanges, which explains the provisional tagline: "You Pet My Back, I'll Pet Yours." For my money, the unnatural spelling screams of domain desperation: I'll bet the founders tried for Spott.com, which is parked and probably has a high asking price. If three consonants are the start of a trend, I hope it's a short-lived one.

Viewdle, based in New York, Kiev, and London, is "a facial-recognition powered digital media platform for indexing, searching and monetizing video assets." So there's a reason for "view" in the name. But there's no excuse for a name that everyone is going to hear as "Futile."

Xobni, another San Francisco startup, is "inbox" spelled backward. The founders explain on the About page: "We started Xobni because we realized there was an amazing opportunity to leverage our abilities in machine learning and statistical modeling to 'take back' the email inbox for our users." OK, now I get it. But I still can't pronounce it--not even with the little long-vowel-sound bar over the "o" in the logo. Zohbnih? Ex-oh-b'nee? Fuhgeddaboutit. Some words just don't swing both ways. (But at least one prominent venture capitalist thinks the Xobni service is the bomb.)

Word of the Week: Blurb

Blurb: A brief endorsement or favorable publicity notice, especially on a book jacket.

"Blurb," which celebrates its centennial this year, is one of relatively few coined words to become well established in the American lexicon. Invented by the writer and illustrator Gelett Burgess (1866-1951), it made its debut at the 1907 American Booksellers Association in the fictional person of "Miss Blinda Blurb," whose illustration graced the cover of Burgess's book Are You a Bromide? (Burgess had previously coined "bromide" to mean "a boring person"; the word eventually became attached to the boring pronouncements of boring people. Although he created more than 100 new words*, Burgess's only lasting successes were "bromide" and "blurb.")

Language maven Allan Metcalf writes in Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success:

Blurb was unquestionably original as well as successful. In this case, however, Burgess did not set out to coin a word. He drew a cartoon of an attractive woman, named her "Blinda Blurb," and added some hype about his book. It must have been a bookseller or publisher--or perhaps Burgess himself, later--who transferred the meaning from the woman to the words of praise.

"Blurb" today is also the name of a self-publishing company in Silicon Valley that transforms manuscripts and blogs into books. (In the latter case, the product is called a "blook." A Blurb competitor, Lulu, sponsors an annual "Blooker" prize, a play on Britain's Booker Prize.) Blurb recently announced an unusual arrangement with conventional publisher Chronicle Books, in which Chronicle will refer its rejects to Blurb, which in turn will publish the manuscripts and split the proceeds with Chronicle. (Update: see comment on this post from Joseph Ternes of Chronicle Books.) According to Newsweek:

It looks to be a win-win arrangement: Chronicle gets a "talent lab" where it can watch for new work bubbling up in popularity, Blurb gains early access to a market of spurned wordsmiths, and authors achieve a place on the radar of a hip midsize publishing company with the resources to turn a Web sensation into a national best seller. "We'd love to be the Sundance Film Festival of the book world," says Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins, referring to the annual Utah film festival known for launching small-budget films into larger markets. All one needs to enter the festival fray is (alas) a rejection letter from Chronicle and money for Blurb, which offers free design software and charges clients for each book printed at rates ranging from $12.95 for a 40-page trade paperback to $159.95 for a 360-page coffee-table hardcover.

Those figures refer to single copies, by the way.

(Thanks to Tate Linden of Thingnamer for recommending Predicting New Words.)

*A selection of Burgess's other coinages (from Predicting New Words):

agowilt: sickening terror, unnecessary fear, sudden shock

bleesh: an unpleasant picture, vulgar or obscene

edicle: one who is educated beyond his intellect, a pedant

impkin: a superhuman pet, a baby in beast form

wijjicle: a perverse household article, always out of order

Take a Colon to Lunch

Today, Sept. 24, is National Punctuation Day, a holiday invented three years ago by Bay Area copywriter Jeff Rubin to remind corporations and schoolchildren that "a semicolon is not a surgical procedure." On the NPD website, you can click on punctuation symbols to learn their proper use, discover how best to celebrate NPD (Step 1: "Sleep late"), and download a recipe for Punctuation Meat Loaf (which I expected to contain a teaspoon or two of Mrs. Dash, but it doesn't).

If you're feeling especially celebratory, you may wish to read Michael Sheehan's post, "Die, Exclamation Point!!!!!!!!!!" I've written a few posts on punctuation myself.

September Linkfest

This month's theme is word lists, name lists, and lexicons--invaluable for name developers and other word-lovers.

Etymologically Speaking is a list of English words with curious origins compiled by Stephen Morgan Friedman (no relation to me). Did you know that porcelain comes to us from Italian porca, meaning "female pig"? But wait--there's even more to that story. (Via OurBold Hero [del.icio.us]).

The New American Sub-Standard Politically Incorrect Dictionary provides this definition for ass (adj.): Very, extremely. "Tyrone kept his apartment ass cold to give the chicks high beams." (More on ass words here.)

Eskimos may not have 100 words for snow--linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum laid that myth to rest--but they seem to have thousands of words that end in the letter K, as this Eskimo Dictionary proves. (Read about the prevalence of the letter K in contemporary American naming conventions here.)

Speaking of snow, every page in the Ski Dictionary is a wiki, which means it can be edited by users. Still, it's not the most user-friendly online dictionary I've encountered (you'll have to go here, and then scroll down, to see the beginning of the word list). It's certainly well researched, though. It's here you'll learn, for example, that a stivot is a term used by American male skiers that combines "step" and "pivot." Note: downhill (Alpine) ski terms only. (Via JeffPrucher.com, home of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.)

The Archive of Cool Words isn't alphabetized, but who cares? It's cool. Example: Marmoreal--of, relating to, or suggesting marble or a marble statue, especially in coldness or aloofness.

The Meaning and Origin of Names was compiled by Trinity College, a boys' school in Perth, Australia; it's a meta-list with links (some of them broken, unfortunately) to a whole bunch of fascinating resources. For starters: Australian place names, Aboriginal baby names (scroll down for links to many other baby name sites, from Aramaic to Zimbabwean), and the super-peculiar Kabalarian name-analysis site (short analysis free, longer analysis for a fee).

Okay, this last one isn't technically a dictionary or a lexicon; it's a list of online shorthand (also known as IMglish, from instant messaging) that New York Times technology reporter David Pogue published in his blog. Pogue asked his young interns for contributions, and they came up with abbreviations like FCAO (five conversations at once), JUOC (jacked up on caffeine), and KYST (knew you'd say that). In the interest of fairness, Pogue invented some IMglish for parents and employers, also known as geezers. A few of my favorites:

WIWYA — when I was your age

YKT – you kids today

NIWYM — no idea what you mean

CRRE — conversation required; remove earbuds

IGAT — I’ve got abbreviations, too

Word Play

Oxford University Press has posted an online crossword puzzle that incorporates several of the 2,500 new words included in the sixth edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, which was published today. "Shorter" is a relative term: This is a two-volume set that comprises 3,888 pages, weighs 13.6 pounds, and retails for $175 (but you can find deep discounts).

For more about the dictionary, read Erin McKean's post at Dictionary Evangelist and Ben Zimmer's catchily titled "Oomphy Wordsmithery of the Anglosphere" at his OUP blog.

Snowclones with a Twist

The other day, within a half-mile radius in downtown San Francisco, I spotted four billboards advertising four brands of vodka. The proliferation of vodka brands is an interesting story in itself, but not what I want to talk about here. No, what caught my attention was that three of the four billboards employed snowclones in their slogans.

A snowclone is a formulaic cliché such as "X is the new Y" ("Pink is the new black," "Vodka is the new whiskey"). The term derives from linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum's famous "If Eskimos have N words for snow, then surely X have Y words for Z." Erin O'Connor, also a linguist, has been compiling an ambitious Snowclones Database.

I'd been musing about clones anyway, ever since reading Laura Ries's post on copycat brand strategy. However, I suspect that the creators of advertising sloganclones--as I propose to call them--aren't employing a conscious strategy. More likely they think they're being savvy and original. A little research demonstrates otherwise.

Here are the three sloganclones I spotted. (The fourth billboard, for Russian Standard vodka, simply reads "Pure Russian." Boring and undistinctive, but not a snowclone.)

Svedka--a nicely constructed name for a Swedish vodka, combining three letters from "SvenskeSvenska" (Swedish for "Swedish") and three from "vodka"--is the brand with the buxom "fembot fatale" and the website copy that declares, "It's time to party like its [sic] 2033." The snowclone on Svedka's billboard invites drivers to "Make cocktails not war." (Image via AdRants.)

"Make X Not Y" was popularized as "Make love, not war" by the 1960s counterculture and used by John Lennon in a 1973 song. The phrase is what students of language call a "winged word" that "flies" from its original context into the general culture. It became a snowclone when sloganizers began switching out the nouns to create taglines and headlines such as Make Falafel, Not War (International Herald Tribune), Make Wine, Not War (New York Times,  Café Press, and others), Make Levees Not War, and Make Love Not Spam. (Update: Johnny Cupcakes in Boston sells this Make Cupcakes Not War T-shirt.)

The second sloganclone is attached to the oldest brand in this bunch, Stolichnaya, whose handsomely designed ad proclaims Stoli to be "The Mother of All Vodka from the Motherland of Vodka." I'd seen this ad previously, but not since reading my colleague Tate Linden's commentary on "Mother of All X" over at Thingnamer. Tate notes that "Mother of All X" has been used thousands of times to promote products and services since Americans first heard Saddam Hussein threaten the "mother of all battles" during the first Gulf War. (I'm rather fond of "The Mother of All Search Engines" from Mamma.com.) In English, "Mother of ..." carries additional impact: It suggests a no-longer-shocking interjection ("Mother of God!") and the still-somewhat-shocking "motherfucker." Note the kicker at the bottom of the ad: "Choose Authenticity." Rather amusing when you consider how oft-cloned the slogan is.

For me, the most interesting combination of brand name and advertising slogan is 360 Vodka's "Saving the Planet, One Glass at a Time." This 360 Vodka is not to be confused, by the way, with Three Sixty Vodka: The latter comes from Germany and the former, a division of McCormick Distilling, is made in Weston, Missouri. (Want to be really confused? The brand name is 360 Vodka; the URL is vodka360.com. According to public records, vodka360.com changed hands in 2006 for just $1,000. You too can join the party: There are lots more "360" domains for sale here. Herpes360.com, anyone?)

The "360" part may be imitative, but other features of this brand stand out in a crowded field. 360 Vodka calls itself "the world's first green vodka": The liquor itself is clear, but its greenish bottles are made from 85% recycled glass and the distillery "has improved its eco-footprint measurably over the past 5 years." The website is sprinkled with "eco-factoids" such as "The average person generates 4.5 lbs. of trash every day." Remove the closure from a 360 Vodka bottle, mail it back in a prepaid envelope, and the distillery will donate $1 to "recognized environmental causes" through its "Close the Loop" program.

But back to the slogan. Just how popular is the formula "Saving the X, One Y At a Time"? Very. Take a look (note: some of these examples are title-clones):

Saving the World, One Drink at a Time: Martini Groove, a spirits blog

Saving the Planet, One Socket at a Time: Engadget

Saving the Planet One Atom At a Time: Carbon Reclamation Project

Saving the Planet, One Toilet At a Time: The Plumbing Guys

Saving the World, One Treatment At a Time: subtitle of book by Chemo Girl

Saving the Earth One Onesie At a Time: MyConservationBaby

Saving the Planet, One Seed At a Time: various gardening blogs and forums, including this one

Saving the Planet One Job At a Time: CommonGround

Saving the World One Stitch At a Time: Knitting Medic

Saving the Rainforest, One Morsel At a Time: Worldwatch

... and on and on. I also jotted down variations such as "one car at a time," "one flush at a time," "one square of toilet paper at a time," and--because someone had to do it, I guess--"one thong at a time."

If not original, the 360 Vodka snowclone is at least appropriate to the unusual brand story. You could argue that the Stoli snowclone is, too--it has that socialist-realist ring to it, a fitting counterpart to the visual design. Svedka is attempting something different, fashioning a brand that's all about campy futurism--and all attitude and positioning. The antiquated "Make X Not Y" snowclone does communicate campiness, but it's hard to find any futurism there.

Has anyone else spotted snowclones in advertising? Leave a comment and tell us about them.

Good News

The New York Times, finally cottoning to the notion that information wants to be free*, has abandoned its pricey TimesSelect program and made all current web content free--including columns by Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd--as well as all archived material back to 1987. The change took effect this morning.

If you start noticing more advertising on the site, it's no coincidence.

Now Rupert Murdoch, new owner of the Wall Street Journal, says he's "leaning toward" making WSJ.com free as well. Full online access currently costs $79 a year. Like his counterparts at the Times, Murdoch would expect to make up the difference, and then some, in ad revenue.

* From remarks by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand's full quote: ""On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." Link.